


Clearly Now

by BraveKate



Series: Dark Visitor [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Afterlife, Campaign 1 (Critical Role), Disturbing Themes, Don't Examine This Too Closely, Drug-Induced Sex, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, I'm dealing okay, Omnipresence, Retrospective, Siblings, Spoilers, Tearjerker, just fuck me up fam, twin feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 04:36:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15766734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BraveKate/pseuds/BraveKate
Summary: You can see much clearer now. All things previously hidden came forth, awash with light. This vision transcends time and prostrates across planes; becomes synonymous with knowledge, and there’s nowhere to hide from it, because you yourself are nowhere.No… wrong. You simplyaren’t.





	Clearly Now

**Author's Note:**

> "I'm fine. It's fine. Everything's fine. We're fine. It's fine."—©Lindsay Ellis

You can see much clearer now. All things previously hidden came forth, awash with light. This vision transcends time and prostrates across planes; becomes synonymous with knowledge, and there’s nowhere to hide from it, because you yourself are nowhere. 

No… wrong. You simply _aren’t_.

***

_Past is an open book._

The fall of Emon is still bright before your eyes, yet this? This is worse. You had this nightmare, you think, but sheer horror unleashed upon your psyche made the brain erase the worst of it.

You’ve been broken apart – _never separate the party_ – and neither gnomes nor the taller folk are here, in this torture chamber of a temple. Its residing deity is messing with intruders for inhumane amusement; a sick, disgusting game. The hall you’re trapped in is vast and pristinely white. Two pillars of light pierce the center, a helpless figure suspended in both. Your heart constricts.

To the right – blood floods in – is Vex.

To the left – blood pumps out – is Keyleth.

“Choose one,” a mocking voice says.

***

You see Vex’ahlia dreading and hoping in equal measure each time her belly grows; you see her relief and disappointment with every new, _sole_ life she brings into the world. The flame keeps smoldering, because she has not the knowledge you possess. Twins, at least the type you were, – are, always, forever – mirror images of one another, only pass down a father’s line. Vex’ahlia won’t have a pair. You would have, or your children would. 

You see them, too. Your children. Blue-eyed redheads with laugh like silver bells, tiny bare feet blinking as they’re chased down the hill by mountain winds. This vision you shared with Keyleth for a short while, until routine crimson between her thighs crossed it out of existence. (They would have felt uneasy near Aunt Vex, the embodiment of their worst nightmare, would have been vary to visit Whitestone. Would’ve hurt her more.)

Unbeknownst to him, your father was a twin. He walked through years a shattered person, underdeveloped. Shame you’ll reunite behind the veil so soon after he learned to be whole. He always felt, you now see, as if he was robbed of something; and he was. He had his other half. Carried it along across all the loneliness; carried what was left in his head, tacked neatly against a wall of his skull. Scraps that survived ingestion. A couple of teeth, some hairs and tissue surrounded by organic cocoon like a morbid pearl. In a short time, the pressure on adjoining vessels will become too much. It has already came to pass, in a sense.

***

You had discussed this precise situation before, of course. You weren’t oblivious.

“Simple,” Vex had said, shaking her hair out in ostentatious indifference. Still, snowflakes lingered in the braid – crystalline memories of melted Emon winter. “You leave me behind.”

It had felt like a possibility infinitely removed, the way a parent’s death is removed from reality for most children. The feeling had taken away whatever gravitas remained. You had frowned and asked:

“Why?”

“I won’t be able to live with such sacrifice. Watching you wither away…” She had shuddered. “Spare me the guilt.”

“Vex-”

“You would want me to leave you behind, correct?” She had parried, turning to you with a pinning gaze.

There had been nothing else to add.

***

You see that one time in your Matron’s temple, during the Consecration Rites. Vestals, arriving to Vasselheim for anointment – all cloaked and with masks covering their faces. Alongside other paladins, you are hoarded by Maidens for cleansing and given simple black robes to don. There’s cloyingly sweet incense floating blue on the air. An abundance of spiked saccharine wine to help things along. Flickering torches feed hallucinations: shadow figures and disembodied elongated faces await at every corner. Your pulse is a drum.

You get two, a brother and a sister. Younger than you, but not by much. Shorn heads. Their dark skin reflects light in stunning shimmering stripes. Their limbs are graceful, statures willowy. White porcelain verges their luscious lips without covering them. Despite this, you do not kiss.

You suspected then what you know for a fact now. They were twins, of course.

Syrupy wine is vomited back up. It cools on the stone floor, black as blood.

***

The space Vex called yours in her home has long since been turned into a museum of fallen comrades and bygone days. It’s kept tidy and neatly organized; your sister does not seek it out, nor does she avoid it. She shows all curious guests around gladly, and your nephews and nieces are not forbidden from playing inside. Atop the hill, however, your old room in the de Rolo castle interrupts its interior like an awkward pause does a conversation. For lack of better ideas, they keep spare antiques in there, veiled against grime and darkness. Among others rests a silver mirror with too prominent a patina cataract to keep in the front halls. The cover atop it seems less dusty than others. Like it’s removed sometimes.

Sometimes-

Sometimes Vex’ahlia puts on a hooded cloak. You taught her well: she slips inside effortlessly, unnoticed. She tags the sheet from the mirror without looking and turns her back to it. Under her breath she sings a song your mother used to sing as she – you see this overlaid, simultaneously – cradled and rocked your pink fragile bodies to sleep. Elaina’s hands sway back and forth, through eons and galaxies, as her words swirl across time to land on Vex’s lips in this dim, stale room. Vex’s fingers fly up and through her hair. She unbraids it slowly, and parts it, and lets it hang loose, straight. The hood is tagged over it.

Kneeled before the mirror, eyes downcast, she presses her forehead to the cool surface. Her fingertips pet it, and the lullaby leaves a misty oval beneath her lips. Shadows obscure all those miniscule differences gender put on your faces, leaving only the underlying mold. One for two, this sameness. When the glass gets warm under Vex’ahlia’s caress, it feels like it’s not just a phantom of reflected light sitting across. It feels like someone’s really there, parted from her by but a thin screen. And, in some way…

“Brother,” she whispers, raising her eyes at long last.

…in some way, there is.

***

You look up to Keyleth’s face, the beloved shape of it. Your palm remembers cradling her silky cheek. Your eyes remember the arrangement of freckles atop the bridge of her nose. Your lips remember catching the searing hot moans hers exhaled. Keyleth’s gaze harbors green-gold of the forest sunlight in it; that, and deep understanding. You look away, down the copper waves of her hair.

The paralyzing light lets go, and Vex is collapsed to the floor in a suddenly unconscious heap. You bend down to take her right arm and leg, drape them around your shoulders. You push to stand, accepting the weight: familiar, of your sister, and the new one, of the decision you made.

Keyleth cannot speak, but as you turn to look (for what you then had perceived to be the last time), she seems proud of you.

***

You see many other things. Scanlan’s sacrificed wish. Keyleth’s raven companion. Shaun’s flinch when he rejects a dark-haired half-elven lover. 

Grog, learning to write your full name properly just because. Pike, teaching him. Percy, as he turns over the shoulder to share his exasperation and finds emptiness instead.

Trinket will keep secretly sniffing around for your trail and hope to haul your ass back to his grieving owner until the day Forefather Bear calls him home. Velora will, also secretly, accompany her roaring friend on these excursions as often as she can.

There’s more, always more. You get glimpses into forbidden that scary you. Plots and mysteries and secrets. Emperors and gods and sparks of arcane. A young men with soot-covered face, tear streaks pink through the grey mess, watching a house you somehow know to be his home burn to the ground. At the very edge of your vision, the furthest ridge, you see someone so radically different from you; someone who, nevertheless, holds your voice. 

Above all else, you miss Vex. Like a suspended breath, like she’s an exhale to a lungful you’re holding. A drop of solace: the final visit you’ll pay her before becoming one for good is never far. The night you’ll ride those Whitestone streets again, travelling through the Eastern Ward to collect, you’ll pass by erected, established temples of worship and knowledge. Surrounding darkness will glimmer, gilded and bejeweled with their glory. Your blood will be sleeping in every building you’ll pass; your flesh and bone. None of it had been there when you last were. For centuries, it will stay.

***

Vex is fuming because she’s scared and upset, but, most importantly, relieved underneath it. Glad to be alive, happy Vox Machina reached you in time to save everyone. _We live another day._ You want to say she shouldn’t let guilt consume her whole. It’s only natural, her self-preservation. You resist the desire. You wouldn’t have, if you ever got another go.

“We talked about this!” She spits out. “You were supposed to leave me!”

***

“Don’t cry for me.”

“Then don’t leave me.”

“You’re asking for impossible.”

“Well… look at us. Twins after all.”

**Author's Note:**

> I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,  
> I can see all obstacles in my way  
> Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind  
> It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)  
> Sun-Shiny day.


End file.
